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Unmanned spacecraft have visited the other planets of our Solar System (and some of their moons), beaming back pictures of varied and distinctive worlds – but none propitious for life. However, prospects are far more interesting when we extend our gaze to other stars. Most stars are orbited by retinues of planets. Our home Galaxy contains a billion planets like the Earth. Do some of these have biospheres? Moreover, our Galaxy is one of billions visible with a large telescope – all the aftermath of a cosmic ‘big bang’ 13.8 billion years ago. More astonishing still, ‘our’ big bang may not have been the only one. The remarkable advances in recent decades are primarily owed to new engineering and technology. Armchair theory alone doesn’t get us far.

Recent articles have put into question the reproducibility of published research and have allocated some of the blame for un-reproducibility on a lack of integrity. This is a matter of major concern for the European Commission, and especially for its Scientific Advice Mechanism Unit. This article gives the view of the Head of that Unit.

In spite of all their assets and resources, global cities (to be understood as a concentration of global capital players along with a large diversity of other presences) have disorder wired into the urban space itself. There are contrasted understandings of public disorder and of its links with globalization. Some disorder is a necessary step in the adjustment of change. Urban space is then a political resource for all kinds of grievances, given coverage by the media and by the internet. The police are an essential piece in their own interaction with protesters. The ritualized nature of public confrontations should be underlined. France offers a good illustration of this phenomenon with its approach to order maintenance. Police officers’ ability to use or not use force, to distribute social status and to categorize their opponents in dealing with order reveals that the police’s role lies at the root of political order and the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms. Recent uprisings unveil the role played by urban space and by the empowerment it provides for people assembled together to make claims. Civil societies’ capacity of resistance to decisions or processes perceived as harmful should not be downplayed. New forms of religious terrorism however mark a new chapter in the links of globalization and disorder. Lots of unknowns emerge and we need to understand and accept unpredictability and even embrace it in order to make sense of it in the future. My assumption is that some current forms of public disorder are not just a repetition of past disorder and that we see new patterns emerging.

Istanbul and Bucharest are major European cities that face a continuing threat of large earthquakes. The geological contexts for these two case studies enable us to understand the nature of the threat and to predict more precisely the consequences of future earthquakes, although we remain unable to predict the time of those events with any precision better than multi-decadal. These two cities face contrasting threats: Istanbul is located on a major geological boundary, the North Anatolian Fault, which separates a westward moving Anatolia from the stable European landmass. Bucharest is located within the stable European continent, but large-scale mass movements in the upper mantle beneath the lithosphere cause relatively frequent large earthquakes that represent a serious threat to the city and surrounding regions.

This article supports the belief that transnational and glocal mechanisms have drastically affected identity and memory formation processes; thus, very diverse memories regarding complex episodes of migration or trauma are currently regarded as connected through multidirectional and cross-cultural patterns. Drawing on the fields of Trauma and Memory Studies, which consider the therapeutic role of art to represent and abreact troubled individual and collective experiences, the new hybrid identities born from this exchange and relationality have proved to demand new forms of representation. In particular, numerous groups of transitional women have recently fostered transnational engagements of womanhood through their creative works. Thus, some contemporary examples will be provided to show how art can be an empowering tool for contemporary transitional women to acquire a voice as well as a promoter of empathy for the modern glocal subject.

The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to the largest observed scales. At the microscopic level, we still do not know the composition of this dark, or invisible, matter, which does not interact directly with light. The simplest assumption is that it is made of new particles that interact with gravity and, at most, weakly with known elementary particles. I will discuss searches for such new particles, both space- and Earth-bound, including those experiments placed in deep underground laboratories. While a dark matter particle has not yet been identified, even after decades of concerted efforts, new technological developments and experiments have reached sensitivities where a discovery might be imminent, albeit certainly not guaranteed.

This article presents a personal perspective on why it is interesting and important to test all kinds of fundamental laws and search for as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions using laboratory-based non-accelerator techniques. Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits.

Last year, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration announced the first detection of a gravitational wave. A century after the fundamental predictions of Einstein, the first direct observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole was made. The observations provide unique access to the properties of spacetime at extreme curvatures: the strong-field and high-velocity regime. It allows unprecedented tests of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes. LIGO and Virgo realized a global interferometer network, and more detections were made, including a signal from a binary neutron star merger. The scientific impact of the various detections will be explained. In addition, key technological aspects will be addressed, such as the interferometric detection principle, optics, as well as sensors and actuators. Attention is paid to Advanced Virgo, the European detector near Pisa, which came online in 2017. We end with a discussion of the largest challenges in the field, including plans for the Einstein Telescope, a large underground observatory for gravitational-wave science.

Many implications of the discovery of the Higgs boson are discussed, together with a short overview of the new challenges in particle physics. The paper also presents a non-exhaustive review of the current plans in the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model at high-energy accelerators.

Local gauge invariance can materialise in different ways in theories for quantised elementary particles. It is less well-known, however, that a quite similar situation also occurs in the Einstein–Hilbert formalism for the gravitational forces. This may have important consequences for quantum theory. At first sight one may even think that it renders gravity renormalisable, just as happens in local gauge theories, but in gravity the truth is more puzzling.

This contribution gives in its first part an overview on factors of the decay and death of whole languages, focusing on dependency relations between these factors. They are organised along the following dimensions: socio-political, socio-economic, sociocultural, socio-psychological, and linguistic dimensions. The order of these dimensions partially represents a causal chain from left to right, but with many feedback relations. The second part of this article deals with early (socio-)linguistic indicators of language decay and discusses in this respect massive and asymmetric borrowing from the dominant into the recessive language, the loss of productivity of word formation patterns in the latter (illustrated from Breton), changes in name-giving (doubtful), shift of ‘foreign accent’ from the dominant to the recessive language, borrowing of morphological and syntactic patterns (inconclusive).

This paper will examine one of the most characteristic syntactic properties of languages, namely the case system for the following three Sinitic languages spoken in Northwestern China: Línxià (or Hézhōu), Tāngwāng, Gāngōu, which have been sometimes viewed as ‘mixed languages’. An answer to the following main questions will be tentatively suggested in the conclusion: do we really have case suffixes in these languages (cases are a morphological notion) or simply thematic roles expressed by postpositions (thematic roles are a semantic notion)? Do we really have a Qinghai-Gansu linguistic area (Sprachbund), as has been suggested? Can these Sinitic languages be characterized as being mixed languages?

In this paper we discuss changes in possession marking in Tének (also Teenek, Huastec), a Mayan language spoken in Mexico. While traditionally only alienable possession is marked overtly with the suffix -il attached to the possessed noun, the marker of alienable possession is being extended in the speech of young and socially mobile Tének speakers to contexts traditionally lacking overt possession marking. We attribute this extension to changes in social and cultural patterns in Tének communities. Thus, we show that the choice of possession marking in modern Tének is sensitive to both semantic factors and the socio-cultural background of Tének speakers, including such factors as age as well as the degree of social mobility and exposure to Spanish. In addition, we interpret these developments in terms of ongoing simplification in Tének morphology. We thus take a more general view of grammatical categories as shaped not only by internal developments but also changing cultural and social patterns.

This paper is based on recent research into the small, highly endangered language Giernesiei1 (Guernsey, Channel Islands).2 Language documentation has found unexpectedly rich variation and change in Giernesiei usage, not all of which can be accounted for by regional and age-related factors. At the same time, our research into language ideologies and efforts to maintain and revitalise Giernesiei has revealed deep-seated purist or ‘traditionalist’ language attitudes that resist and deny language change. This nostalgic view of language and culture can hyper-valorise ‘authentic’ traditions (arguably reinvented3) and can lead to reluctance to share Giernesiei effectively with younger generations who might ‘change the language’, despite an overt desire to maintain it. This mismatch between ideologies and practices can be seen at language festivals, in lessons for children, and in the experiences of adult learners who were interviewed as part of a British Academy-funded project. I present a taxonomy of reactions to variation in Giernesiei, which confirms and extends the findings of Jaffe4 in Corsica. I also discuss recent revitalisation efforts that try to bring together older and ‘new’ speakers and promote the role of adult learners and ‘re-activate’ semi-speakers. The findings support the view that full evaluation of language vitality should include documenting the processes and ideologies of language revitalisation.5,6

The town of Wilamowice (southern Poland) is the unique home to the community of speakers of Wymysiöeryś. The language enclave originates from Colonial Middle High German and – according to diachronic dialectological analyses – is made up of a sub-exclave of the so-called Bielitz-Bialaer Sprachinsel. As a result of social and political cataclysms brought by the Second World War and the following ban on and gap in its intergenerational transmission, it faced an inescapable language death. That doom, however, has been restrained by the activities of dedicated native speakers, with Tymoteusz Król (born in 1993) functioning as an eco- and sociolinguistic relay between the generation of last speakers passing away and, unexpectedly, a growing group of potential new speakers. The microlanguage, now spoken as native by fewer than 20 Wilamowiceans, and still without any official recognition at the administrative level, is experiencing an astonishing, but well-prepared and local culture-based revitalisation course. This article discusses the recent achievements and prospective challenges of the revival processes for Wymysiöeryś – from an internal (including T. Król as the youngest native speaker and intra-community researcher) and external yet engaged (J. Olko and T. Wicherkiewicz as participating academics) perspectives, including the recent results of activities undertaken within an integral revitalisation programme based on the successful collaboration of the community, two major universities in Poland, as well as the local school and municipal authorities. The programme covers all three levels of language planning: corpus, status and acquisition. Efficiently combining grassroots and top-down approaches, the collaborating actors also ground language revitalisation in the social, cultural and economical benefits of preserving and extending the local cultural heritage and linguistic landscape.

In many situations of minority language education, the focus has been on gains in the absolute numbers of speakers, with the result that less attention has been paid to the processes and linguistic outcomes associated with students in these educational programmes. In this article, we initiate a discussion on the revitalization situations in Brittany and Kashubia from a comparative perspective. In particular, we look at the different models of education in each of these regions and examine ethnographic data that highlight the attempts of students to attain legitimate ‘speakerhood’ of the minority languages in question. In particular, we take into the consideration the difficulties associated with these situations of attempted additive multilingualism when the general trend, among the majority populations, is toward standardized monolingualism. By way of a conclusion, we attempt to evaluate the different educational systems in both regions in terms of the production of future generations of ‘successful’ Kashubian and Breton speakers by examining the various language ideologies that are apparent in both situations of language revitalization.

Looking at the Spanish impact on Nahuatl both in its full historical trajectory and modern synchronic dimension, I focus on the differentiation between ‘balanced’, long-term language contact and ‘unbalanced’ contact leading to rapid language shift in contemporary indigenous communities. I discuss the connection between accelerated contact-induced language change and language endangerment and shift, highlighting and assessing the mutually interdependent extra- and inter-linguistic variables that influence and shape both processes. Of special importance is the synchronic variation linked to speakers’ proficiency that influences language transmission in the diachronic perspective. On the basis of extensive fieldwork and linguistic documentation I identify several types of Nahuatl speakers as agents of this accelerated language change which leads to individual attrition and shift at the community level. This kind of multidisciplinary approach, taking into account both historical and modern data, can also potentially be useful for other minority languages in the scenario of long-term contact with a dominant language.